UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Functional brain activity constrained by structural connectivity reveals cohort-specific features for serum neurofilament light chain

Sihag, S; Naze, S; Taghdiri, F; Gumus, M; Tator, C; Green, R; Colella, B; ... Kozloski, JR; + view all (2022) Functional brain activity constrained by structural connectivity reveals cohort-specific features for serum neurofilament light chain. Communications Medicine , 2 , Article 8. 10.1038/s43856-021-00065-5. Green open access

[thumbnail of Zetterberg_Functional brain activity constrained by structural connectivity reveals cohort-specific features for serum neurofilament light chain_VoR.pdf]
Preview
Text
Zetterberg_Functional brain activity constrained by structural connectivity reveals cohort-specific features for serum neurofilament light chain_VoR.pdf - Published Version

Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

Background: Neuro-axonal brain damage releases neurofilament light chain (NfL) proteins, which enter the blood. Serum NfL has recently emerged as a promising biomarker for grading axonal damage, monitoring treatment responses, and prognosis in neurological diseases. Importantly, serum NfL levels also increase with aging, and the interpretation of serum NfL levels in neurological diseases is incomplete due to lack of a reliable model for age-related variation in serum NfL levels in healthy subjects. Methods: Graph signal processing (GSP) provides analytical tools, such as graph Fourier transform (GFT), to produce measures from functional dynamics of brain activity constrained by white matter anatomy. Here, we leveraged a set of features using GFT that quantified the coupling between blood oxygen level dependent signals and structural connectome to investigate their associations with serum NfL levels collected from healthy subjects and former athletes with history of concussions. Results: Here we show that GSP feature from isthmus cingulate in the right hemisphere (r-iCg) is strongly linked with serum NfL in healthy controls. In contrast, GSP features from temporal lobe and lingual areas in the left hemisphere and posterior cingulate in the right hemisphere are the most associated with serum NfL in former athletes. Additional analysis reveals that the GSP feature from r-iCg is associated with behavioral and structural measures that predict aggressive behavior in healthy controls and former athletes. Conclusions: Our results suggest that GSP-derived brain features may be included in models of baseline variance when evaluating NfL as a biomarker of neurological diseases and studying their impact on personality traits.

Type: Article
Title: Functional brain activity constrained by structural connectivity reveals cohort-specific features for serum neurofilament light chain
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s43856-021-00065-5
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43856-021-00065-5
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Neurodegenerative Diseases
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10142421
Downloads since deposit
37Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item